Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
Christopher Dawson
The Study of Western Culture
Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, colleges and universities across our land have established dozens of centers, departments, and chairs of Middle Eastern studies, many of them funded by Arab donors with questionable interests. In New York City, the very first all-Islamic public school has recently opened its doors. At Columbia University, the Iranian dictator finds a ready forum. The very professors and institutions that indicted Western civilization as racist, sexist, and homophobic—and went on to eradicate the study of it from their core curricula—now race to extend a brand of academic tolerance toward those who most abhor (and stand ready to wipe out) Western notions of liberty and tolerance. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that the Western world had lost its civic courage, and that such “a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” The state of leadership in American higher education today may be usefully characterized as cowardly and, as Solzhenitsyn knew, such cowardice among the elites gives the impression of an entire society in retreat.
Still, to dwell solely on the twilight of the academic West would be to ignore other points of light that, even if only a flicker, indicate a sure and growing desire to conserve and renew Western civilization. This special section of the Canon offers three examples of the significant work that ISI is doing on an international scale to conserve the roots of our Western patrimony. Through support from the John Templeton Foundation, ISI’s Culture of Enterprise initiative is advancing the international study of markets and morality, economics and ethics, globalization and the good. ISI Books is publishing in English original works by prominent European thinkers, while translations of ISI Books’ titles are appearing in foreign languages around the globe. Finally, old Europe is turning to ISI to renew its traditions through an American-style “conservative movement.”
It is useful to begin this section, however, by thinking about Western civilization itself. As Mark C. Henrie writes in the following essay from ISI Books’ American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, “The defense of the West is at the heart of what it means to be a conservative in the modern world—yet the definition of the West is also a deep source of conflict among conservatives of various sorts.”
–Jeffrey Cain, Canon Senior Editor
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